I guess every company culture is a series of choices, but it is very hard to be diverse -- which appears to be one of Clef's main goals -- when you only recruit in a tightly limited geographic area.
http://stackexchange.com/about/management
http://blog.discourse.org/2013/02/the-discourse-team/
Maybe you have better links? Or maybe you weren't saying that Discourse and Stack Overflow did well on diversity; merely that you think Clef will do badly too? (They seem to be doing reasonably okay right now to me.)
Also, the gender of a company's management team doesn't necessarily reflect the gender distribution of all their employees. And I don't believe Discourse is owned by Stack Exchange.
It changes how seriously I would take his advice.
If someone says "I did X, and without X it would be very hard to do Y.", you would assume that they actually did Y. If you later find out that they didn't do Y, and further that the people they're advising to change their behavior and start doing X are better at Y than they were.. it's a sign you might feel free to ignore their advice.
Wanting diversity doesn't mean having unlimited willingess to sacrifice quality of work to get it.
I think as we keep growing this will definitely change. Would love to learn from someone like you who's obviously been super successful at doing remote well :)
This coming from a guy who worked from home for most of the past ten years, remotely managing a group of 100+ who were located in ten different time zones (including, but not limited to the US, Scotland, Hungary, India, Singapore, China, Mexico and Brazil).
Constant, clear communications and a stated set of mid- and long-term coals is absolutely critical. Get the team aligned, organize your product development, and ensure a consistent, timely feedback loop and you'll be ok. Also, make sure you get all the key players physically together at least 2-4 times per year.
As a small team, things move very quickly and decisions are made or reversed as new information helps guide us. This makes it really hard to keep up with company progress for anyone who isn’t in the office participating in all of the conversations that are going on. As a result, we put a high premium on physical colocation, even though this limits the geography that we can recruit from.
I think this is a common misconception and tools like Slack (or previously IRC) and smart scheduling of skype conferences can go a long way to helping. It's worked great for our team. Our size varies, but up to 14 people collaborating from around the country and world.
Remember, working remotely reduces environmental impact, gives your team more family time because you eliminate the commute, diversity has also been mentioned, larger hiring pool, multiple languages is often a nice side-effect and it gives you multiple time zones which is great for support teams.
I recently noticed that Slack also doesn't appear to support remote work. Kind of an ultimate irony :(
In my daily work at Pivotal Labs, also in NYC, I am embedded in a TDD, pair-all-the-time team. But I also frequently interact with the fully distributed Spring development team via internal Slack channels.
I don't think one approach strictly dominates the other in general. It's contextual. For example: I have ADHD. I have discovered that I actively dislike working alone. Pairing is a godsend for me.
Sure, remote pairing is possible. We have one Pivot with around ten thousand hours of remote pairing experience, and others with hundreds to thousands of hours of remote pairing experience. For most cases it is not as good as a single team in a single location and most of our remote pivots spend time in our offices.
Could it be that hiring remote forces you to be more conservative in choosing developers, favoring ones with ultra strong resumes (in the general sense, not strictly thing written in a PDF), therefore making you pay more for talent and passing on people which could have strong skills but less experience?
It seems reasonable that having people come into the office every day lets you judge them better and quicker, especially if they're not expected to be 100% autonomous. This would lower the risk of hiring someone you think has potential but hasn't proved it yet, which could turn out well for both the employee and the company (as he will be - fairly - paid less).
- It's not a ternary choice between being racist/bigoted, perfectly neutral, or practicing affirmative action. You (along with everyone else) have a set of implicit biases; to curb them and better yourself, you have to take into account things like gender, color or age.
- How do you not know these things in a small startup?
Which you can correct for without ever meeting the person in question or taking into account their gender, color or age.
How do you not know these things in a small startup?
I don't understand. Does starting a company suddenly make you stupid?
I work with a team that deals with a highly complex domain, and for us it is absolutely essential that we are close to and regularly interact with the rest of the business.
This can't be replaced by remote work unless I create an extra layer of analysts to tell the developers what to code, which is both highly inefficient, removes a lot of potential innovation that comes from the synergy between people looking at the challenges for different angles, and a lot less fun for everyone involved.
For me, what happens between developers and non-technical coworkers in the hallways and during lunch is an essential part of the process of making great products together that cannot be replaced by remote work.
(To be clear: within the dev teams we are completely set up for remote work, and any developer can work from home at any time without prior permission. It's certainly not a matter of lack of trust or facilities.)